The first time ’round, I wasn’t convinced. I tried Diigo more than whole-heartedly, for an entire month. I felt very much like it was good, but not really good enough — poor interface (not intuitive), clunky on the Flash / Javascript it relied on, a toolbar that got in my way, etc. I just generally felt that it wasn’t as slick and simple as other tools. I really wanted to like it, as I saw tremendous potential in its application — particularly being able to annotate and “mark up” the web. Its collaborative tools — groups, discussions, and more — also caught my eye. But it just felt too clunky; learning how to use it took time, and some things just didn’t work for me. Eventually, I grew to use Delicious much more and stopped using Diigo pretty much completely in June of this year.
However, now that Diigo’s been re-vamped — version 4.0, y’all — I may have to reconsider.
Start with Diigo’s very clear Tour. Here’s part 1, Research:
What do you think? Is Diigo changing the landscape of tools for collaboration, research, and archiving? How will its shiny-new version impact your teaching and learning? I look forward to your comments and suggestions.
Note: There are two other parts of the tour available respectively: Share and Collaborate (which sound similar to me, but I didn’t come up with the labels!).
The beauty and power of Web 2.0 is in it’s collaborative nature. We are able to benefit from the expertise of those around us.
The sad and unfortunate truth in many schools is that we work in isolation, trapped in our classrooms, our departments, our sections, our schools or our districts.
After a weekend conference at our school, I was inspired to use the former to combat the latter. Collaborating with another teacher, I’ve implemented a school-wide wiki – available only on our portal, unfortunately – to share practices of differentiation. There are areas for differentiating by readiness, interest, or learning profile. Within each of these three categories, teachers can add resources to help with diagnostics, content, process, product or affect differentiation.
I’ve modeled the concept on that of a Creative Commonslicense, without referring to it as such.. Specifically, “there is only one rule: If you modify an existing resource, please add your new creation to the wiki so that another teacher may benefit from your work.”
If there is one thing I’ve heard from teachers, it’s that they want concrete
examples of how to implement change in their classrooms. This is an opportunity to provide those concrete examples for each other. I hope that some of us can lead by example, easily and freely sharing and distributing our best-practice. I hope that somebody else will come along, take my work and make it better. And I hope they share it with me again.
We are two international educators with a creative philosophy of education that involves equipping our students with 21st century literacies and technologies to prepare them for life beyond school. We believe in small and fast change over time, rather than big and long -- hence the title of this blog, Pockets of Change.
Let's face it: Change comes in handy. You can tip the waiter, pay for parking, or donate to charity. Change makes a difference. And wouldn't you rather have a bit of change in your pocket than a whole bucketful? Or worse, none at all?
Rather than clutter the blogosphere with big ideas and overwhelming theories, we thought we'd instead give you our two-bits'-worth of strategies, punctuated with the odd splash of philosophy, and a pinch of humor. Our aim: to give the average teacher tidbits that are small, fast, effective, and (hopefully) fun.
For more details about who we are, please see the About page.
